All of Fifth Platoon is falling back. Running away. And seeing their backs, the emboldened Italians are hot on their heels and the tanks clank-clank-clank behind, the sound of doom.
Rio runs with Sergeant Cole, who, like a magnet passing through metal filings, draws the rest of Second Squad behind him. Panic threatens to take over, Rio can feel it, can feel the razor edge of her own panic. Her combat boots seem unnaturally loud scrambling across loose rock and sand, sometimes silent as she leaps small depressions, panting, panting, gasping for breath in a burning throat.
Ahead she sees a gun of some sort, like a howitzer but smaller. It has a vertical rectangle of steel plate pierced by about four feet of barrel. British commandos man it, four of them, judging by the shallow soup-bowl helmets crouching behind the gun. One of the commandos is improbably smoking a pipe.
“Get past that two-pounder, join up with the Tommies,” Cole yells.
Rio goes tearing past the two-pounder, runs on another twenty feet and sees that the commandos have dug in, and drops herself into a foxhole no more than eighteen inches deep and just wide enough for her to cower in.
But the commando sergeant in the hole isn’t having it. “You can bugger off, mate.” Then he looks at her and does a double take. “Sorry, miss. But you still aren’t taking my hole. Keep running, we’ll take care of Jerry.”
Rio hesitates, searches for Cole, and sees him in heated argument with the British captain, who keeps hacking at the air in a way that makes it clear he’d like the Americans to just keep on running.
Cole has no choice and yells for Fifth Platoon to fall back. He’s not the platoon sergeant, still less the lieutenant, but he’s there and seems to have some idea what he’s doing, so both American platoons gladly accept his order and now all of them, all the Americans, run away. Run down the road. One soldier throws away his rifle the better to run.
It is a rout. It is panic, outright panic now.
It is about to get worse.
27
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—MAKTAR, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA
“Do they no longer teach spelling in school?” Sergeant Rainy Schulterman waves a paper in the air. “There, their, they’re. Three different words! They are not interchangeable.”
Steam comes from her mouth as she speaks. It is cold. She has been typing with fingerless gloves on, and, in addition to two T-shirts, two pairs of socks, her regular uniform, and a field jacket, she wears a sweater knitted by her aunt Zaz. Aunt Zaz (short for Zlota) is an indifferent craftsman, but she has had the great good sense to knit the sweater using olive drab yarn, so it does not scream civilian even though the crew neck peeks out from beneath Rainy’s jacket.
She is assigned to a small, forward detachment of General Lloyd Fredendall’s headquarters, largely, she believes, because she can type sixty words a minute with few errors, and she speaks fluent German. All too often for Rainy’s taste this ends up meaning that she’s just a glorified secretary.
In fact, she’s noticing that the secretarial duties keep growing, while work related to her training and skills is handled by male soldiers.
The Detachment has an official numeric designation as part of II Corps, but is never called anything but “the Detachment” or occasionally, Maktar—the nearest Arab town—familiarly rendered as “Mucked Up.”
General Fredendall has not endeared himself to his soldiers with his decision to keep his own headquarters very far to the rear, where he is rumored to be expending prodigious engineering energies and resources in building tunnels in mountains to safeguard himself from air raids that never come.
There is one good thing from Rainy’s perspective. The general’s distance has led to the establishment of various outposts—like cavalry forts in the Old West—around Algeria and Tunisia in a system that makes it still harder for the general to track or respond to events in the area of his command, which is essentially all of North Africa this side of Casablanca.
Having formed a harsh opinion of the general, Rainy is relieved not to be in the general’s new cave.
On a couple of occasions Rainy has ventured into Maktar itself to see the magnificent Roman ruins dating back to Trajan. And from some of the windows in the Detachment’s walled compound, Rainy can gaze out on a still-more-ancient Roman aqueduct. The area is neck-deep in history and unfortunately completely lacking in heat.
“What is it now, Schulterman?” Staff Sergeant Pooley, seated at the desk across from Rainy’s, asks wearily.
“A report that says, ‘They’re—t-h-e-y apostrophe r-e—tanks are coming through the gap,’ is not the same as a report that says, ‘Their—t-h-e-i-r—tanks are coming through the gap.’”
The staff sergeant nods. He is twenty years older than Rainy and forms the calm counterpoint to her passion. He doesn’t seem to dislike her, but neither does he see much use for her. He is old army, and absolutely no one old army favors women soldiers. Neither do 90 percent of new army officers and noncoms, but among the old guard it is unanimous. Nevertheless, Sergeant Pooley has never been unpleasant about it.
“Your language skills are commendable, Schulterman. Therefore consider yourself commended.”
Rainy aims her big eyes at him and considers a smartass retort. But she likes Pooley. He has tolerated her, and she is aware that she’s a person who requires tolerance, and not just because of her gender. The phrase “does not suffer fools gladly” very definitely applies to Rainy. She makes a note to herself to attempt greater tolerance for fools in the future.
Pooley’s phone rings. He listens, says, “Yes, sir,” and hangs up. “You’re up, Schulterman. Staff meeting. They need someone to take notes.”
Rainy jumps up, arranges her uniform, tries to squeeze the bulk out of her sweater, checks her hair, grabs her notebook and three sharpened pencils, and is on her way in fifteen seconds. Buck sergeants do not keep colonels waiting.
She slips unobtrusively into the conference room where Colonel George Jasper and his staff are gazing thoughtfully at a map spread out across a long, rectangular table.
The colonel is not an impressive figure. He is nearly as small as Rainy herself, is often indifferently turned out, has a lugubrious hound dog face, and despite being third-generation military and a professional soldier who graduated in the respectable middle of his West Point class, seems to have no gift for commanding respect. His staff officers range from incompetent to excellent, but the colonel, much like the general, his boss, has no great talent for differentiating the two.